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CCE in brief

Recovering backpacker, Cornwallite at heart, political enthusiast, catalyst, writer, husband, father, community volunteer, unabashedly proud Canadian.
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Monday, 10 February 2014

Winning the Leadership Deficit

Why indeed? For her to do anything other, in fact, would be detrimental to her cause - i.e. winning.

Winning is what politics is all about. In theory, you need to win so that you can implement some kind of plan (or as is more often the case, stop some other Party from implementing theirs); in practice, however, it ends up being about stacking the deck to facilitate future wins.

This, you see, is the lesson that political operators have been learning over the years as they look at the playing field and see who's scoring wins and how. Attack ads, robocalls, false insinuations, bald-faced lies, emotional button-pushing, muzzling bureaucrats, opposition groups and even your own staff fit into this bill.

Speaking of Bills - how about that oddly-named Fair Elections Act? The Tories have said they're all about hyper-competitiveness in the House and across the Commons; government and anything that fosters equity gets in the way of that. Anyone that speaks against this clearly isn't using their big-girl voice.

The sad part is that those win-centric elites have no idea just how big that problem is becoming. While they decry the authoritarian way Vladimir Putin is peering into the bedrooms of his nation - as well as those of all its guests - we're seeing the same sort of thing happen to an increasing degree here.

It's like a switch was flipped somewhere in the recent past - we've gone from "the voters are always right" with leaders needing to respect results to "the leaders are always right" and therefore skewing the process so that voters deliver the results those leaders want.

Rob Ford is up for re-election as Mayor soon - anyone want to hazard a guess what examples his campaign team is looking to borrow from?

When moderates like Andrea Horwath are willing to check their beliefs (and integrity) at the door if they feel that's the price of getting in, they validate and reinforce the worst offenses committed by their peers.

The bottom line is this - you govern how you win. If you break some rules or ignore some issues to get through the door, it is next to impossible to change your playbook once you get the corner office. Why would you want to break what's clearly worked? If anything, history shows that leaders increasingly fall into the trap of questionable tactics the longer they're in charge.

The people up top have an increasingly narrow focus as they put the win before absolutely everything else. This is dangerous, not just because of the choices (or refusal to make choices) it leads them to make, but for all the other concerning trends out there they're not paying attention to.